This course offers a conceptual framework for understanding China that highlights the intersection of politics and economics. It shows that rather than develop into a full blown market economy, state and party officials at all levels of the political system maintain significant influence in economic development. Such a “political” economy has had both positive and negative outcomes, which we will assess in detail. We also look at the origins, views, backgrounds and relations among leaders, and how those leaders make decisions about public policy and try to get those decisions implemented down through the system. China has few formal institutions through which citizens can participate in politics, but we will study the strategies Chinese people use to try to influence their leaders’ decisions. Finally, we assess China’s future and whether rapid economic development and the emergence of a vibrant middle class will push China towards greater democracy or whether the single party system is likely to survive into the future. The course is a quite useful background for Chinese Politics Part 2 – China and the World.
Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/7FpNL67EbE4

Enseigné par

David Zweig

Chair Professor of the Division of Social Science and Director of Center on China’s Transnational Relations

Transcription

[MUSIC] Now let's talk about the key strategies that leaders have in terms of trying to be successful and trying to move upward within the political system. Now in some ways, these almost seem, obvious. But in Chinese politics, it's not so easy to get ahead. First of all, you have to be on the winning side when there are important battles. Losing can be very costly. You have to avoid getting caught in big purges. I talked before about the Lin Biao affair where Lin went and tried to kill Mao, he disappears in 1971, and people who are forced into retirement and that's the end of their political career. Culture Evolution was a massive purge. Millions of officials, maybe three million officials were sent out from their positions in the central government. 1942 was a major purge when the party rectification, they were up living up in Yan'an, the party was living up in Yan'an and many, many people disappeared, were kicked out of office and some of them died. A third point is you need a wide base and and a wide, a deep base and a wide network of power. So if you compare and we'll see this later, Deng Xiaoping when he gets into a struggle with a man named Hwa Daufung, for leadership of China in 1977, Hwa really doesn't have a chance. He's joined the party 15 years after Deng. He has spent most of his life in the localities. He was not involved very actively in the Civil War. He doesn't have all these kinds of personal links, so he doesn't have this deep base and he hasn't been all around different parts of China to have this wide network. Same thing for the Gang of Four. People who support Mao come to power during the Culture Revolution. They also are easy in some ways for Deng and for other leaders to push out. Another important part, of course, is to have the people's Liberation Army, the PLA, on your side. That's why the General Secretary of the Communist Party usually wants to be the Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission. Another way of important links and ways of ensuring your own success and your own upward mobility, is to have a group of people who you share political history, what we call a kind of a generational alliance. I'll talk about generations more near the end of this class, but today we see Xi Jinping, who's the leader of China, Li Keqiang, the Prime Minister, they all came to power or they graduate from university in the late 70s, and we can see them as forming some kind of generation. Another important thing for people to make their way up, is also to get involved. Now, let me just say, make their way up, but they may not make their way right up into the top ranks. But at least to move up, often from the countryside, or from society, to be able to move into the party, take an importan position. And then move up somewhat to at least maybe a county level position within, the political hierarchy. And these would be, strategy here would be to join political campaigns one of the most common one was to join land reform. If you were a villager back in the, in the countryside in the late 1940s, early 1950s, Communist Party came along and said we have to form, we have to divide up the land now, you could volunteer. You could be what would be seen to be a, in Chinese we call it a xi xi phensa, a really, a someone who is very excited for the revolution and enthusiastic. And you join the Party and help carry out land reform, and that could be an important step forward for you for the rest of your life politically. One other group that we talk about in Chinese leadership, who are very very important, are political secretaries. Each top leader has a political secretary, or an office director, and those people control access to those top leaders. And Wen Jiabao, who was the prime minister from 2002 to 2012, he was a terrific example of someone who was office director for different people. Even office director for Jao Se Young who gets purged in 1989, but he's able to survive. Now, in some ways this may seem funny, but what I do have here at the bottom is the idea of don't die. Right, if you die, you have no chance of getting promoted, and you'll see what I mean by that in a second. Another important experience is really to diversify your experience. It's hard, not so many people when we look at the Chinese leadership, not many people just make it into the center right away and then spend their whole area working in Beijing in the central government and move up to the top ranks. Because they don't know what is going on in the rest of the country. And so what we find is often top leaders need some kind of provincial experience. And here's a list of leaders who make it to the top, pretty much near the top, all of whom have provincial experience. Another example is you have to pick the right patron. By patron, what happens in the Chinese system is, and this is particularly true in 1983-84, after the Culture Revolution, and the Party gets rid of some of the people who came to power through the Culture Revolution. The party itself decides it has to find a new generation of leaders. 1983, 1984 top leaders within the party go around the country asking people, do you have any good ideas for any new leadership? Have you heard about someone down here at this province who is doing a good job? And in fact, Hu Jintao, who will eventually become the leader of China for ten years, and Wen Jiabao, his prime minister. Both of them were working in the western provinces of China. And a man who was a close ally of Deng Xiaoping, Song Ping, heard about them, and then, put their names forward, and they get promoted to the center, or you could get some leader who just is rising himself. And in the case of Jiang Zemin becomes important when Jiang Zemin becomes the leader of China in 1989 after Tiananmen. By 1997 he will pull up a whole group of people from Shanghai, which eventually becomes known as the Shanghai faction, and they make it to the Politburo Standing Committee along with him in 1997. One of the last points that I would emphasize, is really that you don't want to challenge the leader until he's ready to step down. And what we saw in 1986 was Hu Yaobang was impatient. He wanted to try and move, try to push reform faster. So, he wanted to take over the positions from Deng Xiaoping and Deng, in the end, purged him. Now here's one way that I often like to look at elite politics in China. And this is a board game that I've created. Some of you may know it, you may play in your own country. I played it as a child. It was called, Snakes and Ladders, and the game is quite simple, that there are two options that can happen. If you wind up on one square that has a ladder, you then move up quickly, so you jump up. That's a kind of promotion. If you land on a square that has a snake, then you go down, right? And you can either go down and stay on the board, so that here someone coming down, staying on the board. Or you can come down and go off the board, where in fact you get to death. And as once you go off the board and die you can't come back on. In my game once you're dead you're dead, that's it. Okay, so lets say we start here, and you take a die, you roll that die, and you throw that die and you get a one. Well, one's a good number, because it means you go one square and you come to this box, which says that you were in Shanghai in 1921 and joined the Communist Party. There were only about 11 or 12 members maybe at that time, and so that's a promotion, right? That's an opportunity for you, and so then you can move up. Other important, really important square to get to would be Survive the Long March here. If you survive the long march, you get to move up. Now, you get to move up into the top leadership of China, as we'll see later. The people who survived the Long March were running China for, well into the 1990s. If, however, you threw the die, and you got a two, well too bad. That's it. You wind up in Shanghai, in 1927, when the Nationalists proceeded to kill the Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek the Kuomintang. They proceed to kill 10,000 Communists, and as I said, you go off the board in the Shanghai Massacre, and you're dead. As I said, you don't always have to go off the board, and there's a very good example of Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who became the Prime Minister in 1998. He was criticized during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and was kicked out of Tsinghua University. But he gets demoted, but still stays on the board, as compared to maybe a couple hundred thousand people, at least 100, 200 thousand people. Who were arrested during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and were sent off to labor camp, where they subsequently died. Now, here's three fellows who get purged, they don't die, but they get purged. This is a photo that I took, and one of these people is very famous. His name is Zhang Chunqiao, and he was one of the members of the Gang of Four who were arrested right after Mao's death, less than a month after Mao dies, he gets arrested, the whole Gang of Four gets arrested. And these are two other leaders who did quite well during the Culture Revolution, when many of the leaders were knocked out during the Culture Revolution. All right, these two people were able to make it, Zhang Chunqiao and Ji Dengkui, they were able to make it up into the top leadership positions. He became a Vice Premier, maybe they both were Vice Premiers in China. But then Deng Xiaoping wants those guys gone, because they came to power during the culture revolution. And he has a lot of his friends that he wants to move in, so he gets them purged, and that's the end of them. And I took this picture of them.